Pages

Sunday, 2 March 2014

Iain Duncan Smith's "profound moral mission"

I've written before about the Orwellian Tory assertions that Iain Duncan Smith's ideological attacks on the social security system represent some kind of "moral mission" (here). However I'm going to address the subject again, but this time I'm going to examine the thoughts of people that are delusional enough to believe this ludicrously Orwellian distortion.

The primary piece of evidence I'm going to refer to in this piece is an utterly ludicrous piece in the Daily Telegraph by Peter Oborne, which was published in the first week of April 2013, which was the most symbolic week of Tory malice. That was the week in which they introduced "Bedroom Tax" designed to further impoverish hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in society, whilst simultaneously handing a £100,000 per year tax cut to the 13,000 income millionaires in the UK.

The mind-boggling title of Oborne's article is "George Osborne can’t claim credit for Iain Duncan Smith’s virtuous reforms" so lets have a quick look at some of these supposedly "virtuous reforms".

Bedroom Tax: This malicious policy was introduced in the very week that Oborne penned his article. I've written about "Bedroom Tax" several times (here, here, here and here) but perhaps the most damning evidence is the death of Stephanie Bottrill, who committed suicide after being driven into debt by "Bedroom Tax". It was only discovered months after her death that "Bedroom Tax" had been implemented in such a cack-handed way that, like some 40,000 other victims, Stephanie Bottrill should have been exempt all along.

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have to be using to apply it to a "Bedroom Tax" regime that was implemented so incompetently that it drove someone to suicide, even though they should never have been made to pay it?

Forced Labour: Another one of Iain Duncan Smith's favoured "welfare reforms" is the economically illiterate policy of using the unemployed as a source of free labour, often for highly profitable foreign corporations. The hundreds of thousands of people that are herded onto these schemes under threat of absolute destitution, are removed from the official unemployment numbers, despite the fact that they have no paid work and are they still in receipt of unemployment benefits. After Iain Duncan Smith's workfare schemes were declared unlawful by the courts, he had the law retroactively rewritten, so that his schemes would have been lawful had the law been written that way at the time. This grotesque abuse of parliamentary process was carried out in order to stick two fingers up at the courts and keep the estimated £130 million he stole from his victims.

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have to be using to apply it to the discriminatory WCA regime, that results in countless thousands of people being told they are fit-for-work within weeks of their death and costs the taxpayer £50 million per year to deal with all of the appeals against these disgustingly inaccurate "fit for work" judgements?

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have
to be using to apply it to a sanctions regime with targets to drive vulnerable people off benefits, resulting in people actually starving to death?

Wasteful spending and mismanagement: One of the most ludicrous aspects of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms has been his ludicrous profligacy with taxpayers' money. His Universal Credit scheme is way behind schedule and way over budget. Already £120 million has been written off on botched IT procurement and staff working on Universal Credit have described working on the project as "soul-destroying", "unbelievably frustrating" and "a complete nightmare". Other staff complained of "a near complete absence of anything that looks like strategic
leadership in the programme" and "a divisive culture
of secrecy" [source]. Another area of extraordinary waste is Iain Duncan Smith's Work Programme, in which private companies are paid ludicrous bribes for finding people work. It has been shown over and again that these companies claim their bribes from the taxpayer even when their clients found work entirely independently of, or even despite their interference. If it were a Labour minister responsible for this kind of grotesquely incompetent financial mismanagement, Peter Oborne and the Daily Telegraph would be screaming blue murder, but because it's Oborne's mate IDS, it is instead described by them as "wonderful and virtuous"!

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have
to be using to apply it to welfare reforms which ensure that ever larger slices of the welfare budget end up in corporate pockets, instead of in the pockets of the people the welfare system was actually designed to help?

So now to Peter Oborne's ludicrous Daily Telegraph article. Here are some selected quotes, and my responses:

"At the heart of Mr Duncan Smith’s programme is a profound moral
vision"

The only way that these welfare reforms could be considered "moral", is if you are the kind of ruthless Social Darwinist that believes that the poor and vulnerable should be hounded to death like Stephanie Bottrill, Mark Wood and the countless other victims of Iain Duncan Smith's "virtuous reforms".

"I can confidently assert that Mr Duncan Smith’s inspiration is
less political than religious."

"Mr Duncan
Smith fully accepts that a civilised society must always extend a helping
hand to those who, often through no fault of their own, fall on hard times
or are genuinely in need"

In my view, Iain Duncan Smith's reforms demonstrate precisely the opposite. They demonstrate his determination to distribute ever more of the welfare budget to corporations and the idle rentier class, instead of to the people that have "fallen on hard times or are in genuine need". As the welfare budget has been ruthlessly cut, the amount paid out as subsidies to private landlords via Housing Benefit has continued to skyrocket, and the amount being paid out to parasitic corporate outsourcing companies (Atos, A4E, Ingeus, G4S, Serco, Avanta, Seetec ...) has also skyrocketed. If the welfare budget has gone down, yet private landlords and corporate outsourcers are getting more than ever before, it is beyond obvious that the people the welfare system was actually designed for must be the ones losing out.

"All of Mr Duncan Smith’s changes reflect a determination to enable everyone to
live free and morally autonomous lives."

What could possibly promote less "freedom and morally autonomy" that Iain Duncan Smith's Stalinist Workfare schemes that work on the assumption that the labour of the individual is a commodity which belongs to the state which can be extracted, under threat of absolute destitution, by the state for distribution to highly profitable foreign owned corporations like Warburg Pincus, the giant US based private equity firm that operates Poundland. It is absolutely clear that this is another attempt by Oborne to dress up brutal Social Darwinism and ruthless exploitation of the vulnerable as something "moral".

"Mr Duncan Smith is in the process of making a series of momentous
and inordinately ambitious reforms to our welfare system. They bear
comparison to Margaret Thatcher’s great economic reforms because they
involve a recasting of the relationship between the individual and the
state."

They certainly do bear comparison to Margaret Thatcher's destructive economic reforms. Just as she used the power of the state to crush British industries and transfer ever more wealth from working people to corporations and the idle rentier class, Iain Duncan Smith's "welfare reforms" use the power of the state to crush the most vulnerable in society in order to transfer even more wealth to the corporations and the idle rentier class.ConclusionBy describing Iain Duncan Smith's brutal ideologically driven welfare reforms as "a wonderful and virtuous idea", Peter Oborne is one of the people that feeds into Iain Duncan Smith's psychotic delusions that his "war on the poor" is some kind of virtuous moral crusade, rather than a disgusting Tory project to divert funds that are meant to protect the vulnerable into the bank accounts of corporate outsourcing parasites and the idle rentier class. Iain Duncan Smith is clearly a dangerously delusional individual. However, in my view, the people that actively feed into his delusions like Peter Oborne are even more contemptible. The evidence is absolutely clear that the Tories know how incompetent Iain Duncan Smith is, because they didn't dare let such a cognitively illiterate charisma void lead their party into the 2005 General Election.

It illustrates exactly how much contempt the Tories have for the poor, vulnerable and disabled they now champion the man that they didn't trust as steward of their own political party with such Orwellian superlatives, when his track record of failure, incompetence, malice, arrogance and obfuscation is so incredibly clear.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for Another Angry Voice are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.